On Wednesday, I got an email from someone whose name I didn’t recognize, asking me to join JackpotRewards.com with his link so we’d both get $10. It was clearly a form letter, and from someone unfamiliar with me or my site, because I had reviewed Jackpot Rewards way back in February, and had posted about it several times since then. I replied to the mail with a link to my review and said thanks, but I beat you to it. What what was strange was that his email address was listed as “do-not-reply@jackpotrewards.com”, but when I hit reply, the sender’s address changed to a gmail account.
Yesterday, the sender emailed me back, with the same email but just changing the subject of the email to say, “I’m Sorry! I’m trying to win a company email competition so I’m spamming everyone I know!”
First of all, I DON’T know this person. Second of all, “a company email competition”? Did he mean Jackpot Rewards was having some kind of email competition? I was confused. So I Facebook search for “Jackpot Rewards” and sure enough, there is this guy’s name, with Jackpot Rewards listed as his employer.
So…yes, it appears that Jackpot Rewards is offering incentives to its employees to spam, in an effort to bring in new paying members to the program.
Jackpot offers a $10 referral bonus for members who sign up friends who stay on at least one billing cycle as paid members. Yesterday, Jackpot signed up with the LinkShare affiliate network, offering webmasters $30 for each new paying member they could bring in to Jackpot. And on top of this, they’re having a contest to encourage their own employees to bring in new people, one that has them (in their own words) spamming?
This reeks of desperation.
If you’re not familiar with Jackpot Rewards, the site launched in February to much fanfare, offering a guaranteed one million dollar jackpot winner once a week in addition to a progressive jackpot. You could get a free trial membership, and afterwards it cost 3 bucks a week. They also had a cash back shopping program that returned 100% of their commissions from online purchases to their members in the form of cash back.
JR announced their first $1M winner in March, but a month later, they eliminated the guaranteed $1M draw. At that point, I expressed serious doubts about the future of Jackpot Rewards. And here we are, 5 months later, and the site is still clearly scrambling to get members, and now using some questionable tactics to do so.
I won’t go so far as to recommend that you avoid Jackpot Rewards; but be aware that there are some issues going on behind the scenes and proceed with caution.
